I’m having a wonderful time at the Polyglot Gathering. My luggage arrived, finally, and I’ve been speaking even more languages, including Cantonese, Taiwanese, Irish, Japanese, Czech, Russian and Turkish (a few words only). I haven’t found any speakers of Breton, Manx or Scottish Gaelic yet though.

I have been to some very interesting lectures and discussion about subjects like synesthesia, Scots, Indonesian, raising multilingual children, maintaining multiple languages, and the neuroscience of polyglot brains.

This morning I gave a talk about language death and revival, focusing particularly on the Celtic languages. When I saw that I’d been given an hour in the programme I thought I wouldn’t have enough material to fill it, but I could have easily talked for twice as long. Instead I talked for about 45 minutes then opened it up for questions. My talk was semi-structured and semi-stream of conciousness, but it seemed to go down well, and people found it interesting.

Tonight there’s another polyglot games evening, similar to the one we had last night. Tomorrow night I’ll be singing a few songs in the international culture evening. I will probably do a Welsh one and maybe an Irish one, but haven’t decided which ones yet.